Mad Dogs and Englishmen go wrong in the midday sun

In fact I can’t remember the last time a series featured such a stellar cast and a decent director to such empty effect.

With four of the most charismatic,
attractive actors on British television planted in intriguing situations
and exotic locations such as Majorca, Morocco and South Africa it was
hard to see how Mad Dogs could go wrong.

The first assumption to go out of
the window was the notion that, having persuaded Max Beasley, Marc
Warren, John Simm and Philip Glenister to make space in their schedules,
Sky would ensure that the third series would not make the same mistakes
as series two. It would represent a return to the form of Mad Dog’s
2011 debut that earned it a BAFTA nomination.

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Even that
admittedly was nonsense but it was glamorous and exciting, stealing
brazenly from Shallow Grave, Fargo, and particularly Sexy
Beast with a heady, hedonistic brew of dead goats, stolen boats, Serbian
gangsters, corrupt Spanish detectives, kilos of cocaine and a masked midget
killer nicknamed ‘Tiny Blair.’

By
the second series though, the twists were becoming more and more
tenuous and laborious; the four main characters were frankly becoming a
rather laddish bore.

Having seen off masked killer 'Tiny Blair' in series one, is Rick's new nemesis, The Tokoloshe, real or imaginary in series three of Mad Dogs?

So to series three which found our
heroes: imprisoned illegally in the Moroccan desert, being interrogated by the British
government, shot at for a bounty put up by the CIA, and finally given new
secret identities and flown out to South Africa and sent their separate
ways.

Hey, it could happen...

Like series two, it soon became clear that while the idea of the four Brits abroad dealing with increasingly dangerous/preposterous situations was not unappealing, the ‘plot’ was being stretched was being stretched more and more thinly.

At the start, the scenes in the deserted desert prison proved potentially powerful if overly stylised and ultimately dated.

Quinn (Philip Glenister) sweats it out in his cell in the Moroccan desert

Rick (Marc Warren) is interrogated by a covert department of the British government

The combination of heat and dust and terror would have been more effective if we hadn’t seen them suffer it all before. Director Adrian Shergold (who made Persuasion, He Kills Coppers and the masterly Phil Daniels' series Holding On) continued to shoot everything in the high coloured glare of an American video.

As if to acknowledge this, an ostentatiously ‘feisty’ female captive was thrown into the mix to liven things up a bit in the shaven-headed shape of Mercedes (Jaime Winstone as an ex-squaddie who had been rounded by the government after going AWOL in Kabul).

Considering the talents on offer, any moments of actual dramatic depth were lamentably limited.

Before they took up their new identities, Quinn, Woody, Baxter and Rick were given one last phone call home.

John Simm (Baxter) showed how powerful an actor he can be, as offered the chance to speak to only one of his two kids, he found he couldn’t speak to either and was left pleading with his wife: ‘please don’t let them think that I’ve abandoned them.’

Trying to say goodbye, Quinn (Glenister) poignantly found that his dad would only talk about what to do about his satellite dish.

An anguished Rick (Marc Warren) realises the gang in Mad Dogs really have gone their separate ways, leaving him to start his new life in South Africa

Of course, Mad Dogs is not high drama but it had none of the imagination or jeopardy of a Breaking Bad and was a missed opportunity.

That said, the scene in which the lads chose names for their new identities was neatly handled, doffing an obvious cap to the likes of Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, and Elmore Leonard.

In scenes like this, you could feel the rapport that the four stars and the team working on Mad Dogs had developed away on these locations, like a band on the road.

Perhaps if scriptwriter Cris Cole had spent as much time on the actual plot as enjoying making up funny new names for his characters, Mad Dogs wouldn’t have been such thin fare for them to work with and such a let down for us to watch.